Why you don’t have time for your dreams, and what you can do to fix it

Do you know the single biggest excuse I hear for not doing something awesome? Time. That’s it. People don’t have time to start a business. They don’t have time to make themselves better. They don’t have time to be amazing.

And really, it’s the perfect excuse. How can you argue with it? You can’t convince someone to have more time. You can’t talk them into adding a few more hours to their day.

Time is the great equalizer. We all have 24 hours in a day, 168 hours in a week.

Yet somehow some of us are able to do amazing things while the rest of us run around doing busywork.

You have more time than you think

Think about it. There’s something big you want to do. Something awesome. If only you had enough time.

I want to make something crystal clear: you do have time. You have 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Same as me. Same as Richard Branson.

When you say “I don’t have time for that,” what you’re really saying is, “That’s not a priority for me.”

It’s not a priority for me to exercise more to lose weight. It’s not a priority for me to work on my business (instead of in it). It’s not a priority for me to start something awesome.

The first time I heard time explained like that I was a little put off (as you may be now). “Who is this guy to tell me something isn’t a priority? I want it just as badly as anything!”

But the idea nagged at me. In the back of my mind I couldn’t shake the thought that I do have the time to do something awesome.

It’s not that you don’t have enough time. It’s that it’s not a high enough priority. Click to tweet this.

My biggest priorities

And slowly, I began to see it was true. I do have the time to build something amazing. I just hadn’t made it a priority.

When I looked at my time through the lens of priorities, here’s what’s most important to me.

Watching TV

Sleeping

Relaxing

Hanging out with my family

Wasting time online

All of those things I was making time for every single day no matter what.

Is there anything wrong with that? No! Not at all! Some things, like family time, always need to be ahead of my big goals. Others, like wasting time online, need to be a much lower priority.

The point is to understand that I placed priorities on those things ahead of my big goal, and they take up precious time.

The goal isn’t to turn you into a 24 x 7 workaholic. The goal here is to tweak your perspective and empower you to make time for things that are important to you. Things like relaxing and family time should absolutely be priorities, and I encourage you to make plenty of time for them!

But I also suspect your priority list looks a little like mine did. I suspect there’s some low hanging fruit where you can quickly make time to work on your dreams.

And if you have the time to work on a dream, there’s a good chance it will come true one day.